Thursday, January 19, 2006

J.G. Ballard & Nick Broomfield Hate Kill Bill Too

In my review of A History of Violence, I contrasted Cronenberg's serious treatment of the subject with the vacuous designer-violence of Tarantino's Kill Bill volumes 1 & 2. I further elaborated my aesthetic objections to the crass Kill Bill movies in My Beef With Tarantino.

I always suspected that the "Tarantino Haters' Society" was small enough to hold it's AGM in a phone booth, but I consoled myself with the assumption that the quality of the membership compensated for it's obvious deficiency in quantity. In conclusive validation of my hypothesis, this very evening, I was delighted to discover that I'm sharing a phone booth with one of my literary heroes, J.G. Ballard.

Kill Bill Volume I, which I rented the other day, is dreadful. It was scarcely a film at all - just a lot of cinematic posing by Tarantino, who has obviously completely run out of ideas. It's just a compendium of film cliches, which weren't wittily transposed or played upon. Dreadful. It's appalling to think there's a Volume II, and even conceivably a III and a IV somewhere in the echo chamber of Tarantino's imagination. It's a fast-forward experience if you want to save your sanity. I've got 60 years of film-going under my belt, and Kill Bill I is definitely on the all-time bad list.

And, if that wasn't enough, award-winning documentary-maker Nick Broomfield has confessed to being a fully paid-up member of our ever-expanding society.

This will earn me some enemies but I'd have to say Kill Bill - Volumes I and II (in response to the question "Pick your most hated movies of all time"). It's like watching a schoolboy's fantasy of violence and sex, which normally Quentin Tarantino would be wanking to alone in the confines of his bedroom while his mother is making his baked beans downstairs. Only this time we've got Harvey Weinstein behind him and it's on at a million screens. That's why I think all those male prepubescent film critics loved Kill Bill so much. It's acting out all their fantasies. I think Tarantino is very confused in his mixing of sex and violence. On that level he just feels like a young guy whose been let loose in the candy store, and there's suddenly all these violent bitches around that he can put in his movies, and have a lot of fun with. As they say in the business, Kill Bill should never have left the lab.